DeFriest was 19 when his beloved father died in Gadsden County at the dawn of the ‘80s. The mechanically gifted, inventive and impulsive DeFriest went to his dad’s house and picked up his father’s tools. His stepmother called the police.

Before DeFriest could clear his name — the tools were later legally proved to be his inheritance — he exacerbated the misunderstanding by fleeing from the police. That got him four years in the Appalachee Correctional Institute in Sneads.

After month at ACI, he went over the fence and hot-wired a friend’s car. He was caught at the Driftwood Motel in Tallahassee. Later, when he ended up in the State Hospital in Chattahoochee, he slipped blotter acid into the staff’s coffeepot. The staff freaked out from the hallucinations. DeFriest was bounced to the Bay County Jail, where he was beaten, stripped naked, locked in solitary and given no toilet paper.

Wait, it gets even worse for the so-called “Houdini of Florida,” who made 13 escape attempts in total, by the time he ended up at the hellish prison in Starke with a life sentence hanging over his head.

All of DeFriest’s self-destructive, incorrigible behavior is documented in Gabriel London’s astonishing documentary “The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest,” which is being shown on Tuesday by the Tallahassee Film Society at All Saints Cinema.

At times, the documentary has the tone of a dark comedy as DeFriest’s manic antics play like a cross between Cool Hand Luke and H.I. McDunnough from “Raising Arizona” (1987). DeFriest gets a big kick out of making the guards and officers look inept.

“Nobody’s got a sense of humor … they can’t take a joke,” DeFriest explains with a shrug.

The laughter ends in a hurry when DeFriest recounts stories of being beaten senseless by guards, gang-raped by fellow inmates and forced to become the sex slave of one particularly brutish prisoner. It sounds as horrific as anything in “Midnight Express” (1978), a prison movie set in Turkey.

All this for taking your father’s shop tools while the will was still in probate? Where is the justice in that?

DeFriest caught a small break recently when psychiatric examiner Dr. Robert Berland came onboard to testify that Florida’s Houdini is “genuinely psychotic.” Ironically, Berland is the same examiner who once testified against DeFriest in the early ‘80s.

The parole commissioners will have none of it, so DeFriest, who has served 35 years, won’t be released until 2085. DeFriest’s next parole hearing is this fall.

“If I was a rapist or a murderer, they’d let me out,” DeFriest says in the film. “But I’m the idiot who made them look like idiots.”

Sadly, that’s true.

If you go

What: The Tallahassee Film Society presents “The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest.” It runs 92 minutes and is not rated (strong profanity, graphic violence, disturbing conversations about rape and abuse)

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Where: All Saints Cinema, off Railroad Avenue in the Amtrak rail station